North East Area Group Meet - September 09

Another month and time for another Area Group Meet. Unfortunately all the regular die-hards had other commitments. Fortunately two new proud owners turned up. We had Chris with his Cheetah 427 and Mike with his Southern Roadcraft: Chris unfortunately had a prior commitment and couldn't make the drive out. So that left myself and Mike to take advantage of the lovely summers day. The route I had planned was a figure 8 with the lunch stop at Rothbury taking in some nice driving roads - Click on the map for more details:
And here we both are at the lunch stop at Beggars Rig - after all the crappy weather recently it was nice to eat lunch sat in the sun:

Beggars Rig overlooks the River Coquet towards Simonside - time for another photo opportunity - this has turned out to be one of my favourite photos of the cob so far:

Having fiddled with my suspension and tyres pressures again... the end result unfortunately was not as good as I had previously. The time to go down and see Andy at GD is rapidly approaching I think!

A good day of 100+ miles of driving in the sunshine on country roads with beautiful scenery - exactly what Cobra ownership is all about.

Shame about the odd tractor.......... but they were quickly dispatched!

First Scrape! and other stuff

It's not as bad as it sounds...... caught the bottom of the oil cooler scoop on a road hump on the way into a friends estate - no real damage other than some scrape marks underneath out of sight.

On a similar vein - I had the front wheels off this weekend to get them balanced again (long story) and noticed that there was an area of underseal underneath each arch that had been rubbed off by the tyres. So as a consequence of this, and the scrape, I've raised the front ride height slightly. I may revise this after fitting the front anti-roll bar. I've tentatively arranged with Andy to go down to GD end of September and get them to fit the anti-roll bar there and then and get Andy to finish tweaking the suspension.

Going back to the wheel balancing issue - I was getting a slight tremor at 75ish that you could drive through and would be gone by 90. Nothing too drastic but it was starting to annoy me - particularly as I had been and had them balanced on two previous occasions but it had never quite solved the problem. So this time I carefully checked wheel rim and tyre run out (both in line and laterally) and also checked the wheel bearings. Everything checked out within acceptable limits so it was off to a different tyre place that didn't employ "yoofs"!

I stood over the the guy this time and watched the process - as the wheels are quite wide it was explained that I would need two sets of weights on each wheel to get the dynamic balance right - one set on the back edge of the rim the other set towards the front edge but just behind the wheel face so they are not visible. So 10 minutes and 25 quid later job done. It turned out to be a marked improvement and has cured the issue.

It was also time for another clean and polish after spending 4 hours driving in the rain at the last monthly meet. This time I had a change of heart and instead of using Auto Gylm products I used One Grand Omega Glaze followed by One Grand Blitz Wax (Carnauba). In all the whole process took about 8 hours but I was quite pleased with the results:

Finally, after a discussion with my Engine Builder, Jez, we have concluded that I can turn up my rev-limiter from a conservative 5200rpm to 6000rpm - this will give me an approximate increase of 15% in road speed for each gear. This will come in handy as the thing accelarates so quickly I was not spending much time in the lower gears! I just need to psyche myself up for another upside down in the footwell episode first - perhaps in hindsight I should have put the Mallory Hy-Fire unit somewhere more accessible? where though I'm not sure.